When a financial presentation device such as a credit card or debit card is used to make a purchase from a merchant, data pertaining to the transaction including such information as the card account number, the merchant name, the transaction date, and the purchase amount is generated at the merchant location (point of sale) and transmitted electronically to an acquirer. The transaction data is passed from the acquirer to a financial service network and then to an issuer (i.e., the entity the issues the financial presentation device) that provides authorization for the transaction. Upon authorization, the financial service network generates a settlement record of the transaction. The issuer uses the settlement record to generate another transaction record that also includes customer-related (e.g., corporation) data. The issuer-generated transaction records are in turn useful to financial service networks, such as Visanet®, for generating tax reports and other purposes, particularly when matched and enriched with merchant related data (merchant profile records) stored by the financial service network. However, there is a drawback in relying on issuer-generated data, in that it has been found that despite the fact that the transaction records have a standard format, issuers sometimes introduce variations or anomalies into the data of the transaction records, for example, by appending extraneous data in certain fields. These variations, some of which are common, make it a difficult task to match the issuer-generated transaction records with corresponding merchant profile records stored (which would match but for the variations).
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system and method that correctly matches transaction records with merchant profile records by accounting for known variations.